


ma adahl, ma da'uilen'adahl

by alynshir



Series: she is my tomorrow [11]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Cassandra POV, Children, F/F, Fluff, ITS A LOVE STORY SO BABY JUST SAY YES, Romance, Second Person, True Love, magic baby, this is shameless unauthorised fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 17:14:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3904357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alynshir/pseuds/alynshir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassandra Pentaghast is better at promises than she had expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ma adahl, ma da'uilen'adahl

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Dragon Age.

She is terrified, cold, and you hate the little pang of pity amongst all of the hurt in your chest as you look at her. She is so small, like a new tree that has yet to blossom since the snow is too heavy on her shoulders, and you find that the pang in your chest grows larger with every second that you look at her, with every freckle you count on her skin.

“Do you promise you will not kill me?” she asks, her voice quiet, nervous, desperate.

You cannot promise it, you cannot. But she looks at you, with soot on her cheeks and fear in her flora eyes. She cling to your arm, and you hear the stretching of the rope as she holds you. You figure you should shake her off, since it is a boon you cannot grant that she begs of you. You glance down and notice wrists chafed with apple-sore skin from past harsh metal.

Metal should never tie down a tree.

You cannot promise it, you cannot.

“I promise.”

~O~

She blushes, candy apple streaks on her apple-flesh cheeks. She looks up from between apple branch lashes with apple skin eyes, and you catch yourself wondering if her lips would taste of apple as well. No, but this is not appropriate. You still wonder, anyways.

“I…I must look very silly. Like a child, yes? A young girl?”

Her face flushes more, biting down on her bottom lip. Her hands fidget as she tries to resist covering her cheeks, and all you can think of is how she has changed seasons right in front of your eyes. She has grown like a seed from springtime into autumn, autumn of cherry maple lips and dappled leaf freckles and apple cider hair trickling like molasses down apple blossom shoulders.

You nearly hesitate to touch her for fear of shattering the image, for fear of ruining her somehow - she is day and night and summer solstice shines in her smile, and you are but a zephyr who topples all she seeks, be it foe or friend or someone more. But yet somehow, you do find your calloused hand touching her anyways because you both reach out, her apple-flesh fingers entwining with your apple-bark fingers. Then you know you cannot break her under your hands, because you can feel even in the tiny pulse of her thumb’s heart that she is warm and strong like the apple trees, and a simple wind cannot shake such a person as her.

“No,” you say, and you find that you have to clear your throat to make a sound similar to proper speech. “Ahem….no. You don’t look silly.”

“I don’t?”

It is a simple question that you do not want to answer, for the dark summer fire smolders in your cheeks as you think of suitable answers. Yet you do, you do, because as much as your heart hammers, you know she would never laugh at you. Laugh, yes, but never at you. Besides, you would do far more than you are willing to readily admit for a chance to hear this will-o-the-wisp of a woman laugh.

“You look beautiful.”

She ducks her head, a little tree bending in your breeze, and she looks up at you hopefully, nervously, and with a bid of something blossoming that you cannot puzzle out.

“I am…”

She lets out a tremulous breath.

“This is going to go badly, I know it,” she says, and you see her eyes flicker towards the grand doors leading into the ballroom with the fear a rabbit has when catching sight of a hunter.

“It won’t be as bad as you think,” you say. “They will all love you, no matter who they expect.”

Because how could they not? How could anyone not love her? One only had to see her to fall under her spell, you know this far too well, and once she spoke, your heart was hers. You mean this generally, of course…no, no you don’t. You shouldn’t lie to yourself in the midst of a masquerade; you know some who would find the thought woefully ironic.

“What if they hate me?” she frets. “What if I fail everyone? What if I trip and fall over and make an embarrassment of myself?”

“If you fall, I will catch you.”

“Do you mean this? Do you promise?” Her voice trembles and her hands clutch yours in the way roots cling to soil in a storm, this storm, a storm of gilded masks and lacy words.

You have never meant anything more than you do in that moment.

“I promise.”

~O~

The stars wink early in the soft night, wink at you knowingly as rhyming words leave her lips, dancing on the air like their own little aria. Her cheeks burn bright with applefire as she reads, tripping over winter-fairy words she does not know, but she still presses onwards with her blossom of a voice, withstands every gust of garbled letters. Her dappled apple fingers blanch white as she clutches the book tightly, and you think for a second you can hear her heart rustling fast as leaves do in storms.

You know the words she struggles on are what is supposed to matter right here, right now, but you cannot help but tune them out in favor of drinking her in, planting the memory of this little nymph of a woman firmly inside your mind so that it may never fade away into the rest of the forest. You know you are standing there silent, motionless, your own lips slightly parted in the initial surprise that feels like forever ago. The moonlight mist on her apple flesh and makes her glow, makes her glow even more than she already does with her smile, and it shines in her downturned eyes, her apple leaf eyes that are bright with embarrassment as she trips over another word and looks up at you, her face so very red.

“I am sorry,” she says, her voice soft and ashamed as she closes the book quietly. It takes you a moment to absorb what she has said because you are still caught in the crescendo of her summer.

“Do not be sorry.”

“I tried to do this for you, as you wished for it…” She looks down at the ground, and you think you catch a glimpse of dew shining in her fauna eyes. “I made an error of it; it is fumbled now. I did not mean to ruin your time.”

“You could never waste my time.”

She laughs, a forlorn trill of a sound that is still beautiful no matter how sad she is.  
“Do not lie to me, truthful Seeker,” she scoffs, and you feel the autumn wind in her voice buffet you.

“I would not lie to you,” you insist, moving closer as if to convey your point with proximity. She does not flinch back, as you have just realised people tend to do, but she does direct her beautiful gaze back towards the ground. You find yourself tilting her chin up gently, a softer gesture than you knew your hewn, sturdy, woodcutter-worthy hands were capable of.

You would never cut her down, not this apple tree.

She looks up at you now, looks up at you into your eyes as yes, there is too many dewdrops pooling in her eyes.

Her lips look soft, so soft, you cannot help but notice.

“Do you promise?” she asks, and you remember a time not so long ago when you had never meant a promise more than in that moment.

You think this moment might mean even more.

“I promise.”

You were right on that night not so long ago. Her lips do taste of apples. They taste of more though, honey as her arms wrap around your neck, sugar and springtime as you pull her closer, more and more. And you want more.

~O~

She is wearing the color of the clouds today, and her hand is entwined in your hand like the stems of every apple blossom braided into her autumn hair. You feel the ring on her finger as she squeezes tight, and when you look to her, the smile on her face is as bright as the sun, clouds be damned.

You never would have forseen this day coming, and yet standing here, now, with the wind in your hair and the sun in your heart, you cannot imagine it being any other way.

“Do you promise to love and protect her, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?”

Your answer is ready, sure on the tip of your tongue, and you realise that it has always been this answer even from the very beginning.

“I promise.”

~O~

She has been crying out, crying out for you for hours and hours, and yet nobody will tell you what is happening, nobody, nobody. Your shoes wear as thin as your patience as you pace back and forth in front of the door.

They made you leave, they made you leave, and you cannot believe it. She is in there, she is in there, and yet they made you leave.

Finally the cries cease, abruptly, too abruptly, and there is a silence you don’t like - an axe swishing through the soul of a tree. Your heart is the only thing you can hear for a moment, your heart in your ears and your blood pounding staccato. Then someone is saying your name and smiling and the door is open and you feel as if you have been welcomed into paradise itself as you step forward into the room.

She is there, she is there, she is there with her maple hair and apple skin and for a moment you have to just breathe because now that you see her you can finally find room in you for new air. You are at her side, on your knee looking at her like you did once upon a time. Her eyes are closed, and your veins alight with smoke and fear before her eyes flutter like the wings of bees on new blossoms. She looks at you dazedly, new leaf eyes meeting cider, and then she smiles and you feel heat in your cheeks and behind your eyes because she is okay, she is alright, she is more alive than you have ever seen her.

Someone taps you on your shoulder and you regretfully tear your gaze away from her, only to have a tiny bundle wrapped in apple silk placed in your unsuspecting arms. You smell new beginnings and spring thaw and life and when you look down you are looking into the face of a little seedling boy with cider eyes that shine with autumn, just like yours do.

“Do you promise not to have me change his name?” you hear her say, her voice languid and dazed as you look up to face her, your arms rocking slightly like a tree in the wind. (Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop, went the rhyme, didn’t it?)

You can feel it, your face is widened like a child, like the child who is in your arms, like your child, like her child, like…

The phrase ‘our child’ sends a shiver through you, because everything is real and you cannot believe it is but it is.

“What is the name?” you ask, your voice cracking with more cinnamon tears than you thought such a moment like this would require. She smiles at the sound of your voice, and then her eyes soften when she looks into the eyes of the son that is both hers and yours.

“Anthony.”

You promise, you promise, you promise so much that she laughs and leans over and kisses you with lips that taste of apple and honey and she calls you silly, so very silly, but you are her favorite sort of silly and that is one of many reasons she adores you.

You think she could ask you to promise her the world, and you would say yes.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my docs since January, and I decided the night before a major field trip, that it needed to be written. At 2 am. This is my life, these are my choices.
> 
> My tumblr url has changed to alynshirslover, if you need/want to contact me there.


End file.
